According to a leaked slide obtained by The Verge, Spotify is planning to introduce a more expensive price tier that offers higher quality lossless audio streaming. The tier is said to be priced at $10 more than Spotify’s standard offering, meaning it will come in at $20 per month.
Would you pay more for lossless support with Apple Music streaming?
Apple Music currently streams at 256Kbps AAC format, while Spotify’s $9.99 tier gets you 320Kbps, assuming that you enable the option in settings, of course. Tidal’s claim to fame, however, is that it offers 1411Kbps “lossless” streaming quality.
Spotify claims that its $19.99 per month streaming tier will offer “lossless CD quality audio.” There aren’t any details at this point as to what exact quality Spotify’s offering will stream at, though. The service also isn’t completely rolled out. Spotify appears to be A/B testing the price tier, as it has only appeared for a few users on Reddit. When those users attempt to sign up, though, they are presented with an error message.
With the move away from 3.5mm headphone connections, moving to lossless streaming isn’t something that should be too wild of an expectation. With the Lightning connector and USB-C being used more often for headphones, it’s becoming increasingly possible for users to take advantage of such higher-quality streaming.
The big caveat here, of course, is that just because Spotify touts lossless streaming doesn’t necessarily mean it will be an overall better experience than what’s offered by other platforms. For instance, some early comparisons showed that Apple Music offered better streaming quality than Spotify and, in some cases, Tidal’s lossless streaming.
Personally, I’d be willing to shell out up to $20 per month for Apple Music if the streaming quality was notably improved. On the other hand, I’m generally skeptical when companies tout how much better their streaming quality is, so I’d have to be convinced that the quality was actually better before I committed to it for too long.
Would you pay more for Apple Music every month if it offered lossless streaming? How much more would you pay? Let us know in the poll above and the comments below.
